Despite my many differences with Oliver Stone as an artist, I congratulate him on having managed both to present an unhysterical assessment of Latin American leaders and issues in South Of The Border, and also to get it seen in the US. The latter, especially, is achievement indeed.

A rare precedent is Costa-Gavras's Missing, which netted Oscars in 1982 with its horrifying story of the US State Department's involvement in the murder of one of its own citizens during the US-backed Chilean coup of 1973. In retrospect, it looks like the last gasp of those liberal Hollywood instincts that saw producer Bert Schneider thanking the Viet Cong leadership as he accepted his Best Documentary Oscar for Hearts and Minds in 1975.

Elsewhere the story is one of movies ignored, shelved, suppressed and sabotaged. Roger Spottiswoode's Under Fire, set in Somoza's Nicaragua, barely squeaked on to US screens in 1983 amid rumours of studio nervousness – and political interference – when the Contras were at their barbarous high tide. Stone's Salvador was a critical hit you could barely find in cinemas. Ditto Haskell Wexler's Latino, in which Vietnam vet Robert Forster, sent to train the Contras, comes to see how his country is sponsoring mass murder overseas.

Even Missing has its antecedent in Costa-Gavras's career, State Of Siege, about the reasons behind the kidnapping of an American USAID official, which explicitly indicts Fort Benning's School of the Americas, a finishing school for aspirant tyrants. Scheduled as the inaugural screening at the Kennedy Centre for the Performing Arts in 1973, it was withdrawn with the lame excuse that its themes might upset the Kennedy family. It was unavailable for almost 30 years after I saw it in 1981 at, of all places, the self-same Kennedy Centre.

It's the same story with documentaries. Good luck finding Blood Of The Condor, about the US Peace Corps' enforced sterilisation programmes among Bolivian Indians. Patrizio Guzmán's epic The Battle Of Chile (in which one cameraman filmed his own murder by a government soldier) is available – finally – from a US micro-distributor with great taste but little money. The Zapatista documentary A Place Called Chiapas never got serious American distribution; likewise The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, an account of the Venezuelan coup attempt of 2002.

In a way, none of this is surprising. If your country's relationship with an entire continent can be boiled down to a hot-button list that includes Guatemala 1954, the Bay of Pigs 1961, the murder of Guevara in 1967, the overthrow of Allende and the subsequent, continent-wide kindermord of the Condor assassination programme, shame is the decent response. No wonder no one's talking – except Stone. Good for him.

Oliver Stone got so sick of always reading the sanitised version of US history that he decided to write his own. He talks about the real reason America dropped the atom bomb, how Kennedy is a hero and why he can't stand Hillary Clinton